Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Archbishop Desmond Tutu

Meet PKB. She's in my knitting group on Wednesday nights. This woman is one of the funniest people I know. She makes me laugh. She talks funny because she's from the Boston area.

They cahn't speak properly.

They refuse to pronounce r's. As a matter of fact, they drop them entirely. Remember "Pahk the cah in Hahvahd yahd," from My Fair Lady?

We love to tease her about her accent. Really, we love to tease her about EVERYTHING. She tells us the funniest stories about her life and we wouldn't change her a bit. She picks out odd colors for sweaters (kelly green?) and we tell her, "NO!"

She's been knitting the same yarn for at least two or three projects now. She just keeps making mistakes and bringing them in to our teacher, who promptly frogs them. This explains the picture below.We finally convinced her to give up on the sweater pattern she was using and try a new one. She miscounted that one the next week. It had to get frogged too. At first we thought it was the pattern. Now we think it's the yarn.

But it's definitely not PKB. She cahn't make a mistake.

Her husband is a very important person at a local college and he gave her tickets to see Desmond Tutu this afternoon. No one else would go with her, except me.

I met her at her house and we drove into Symphony Hall together. There was a LOT of traffic going into the city. We had about 15 minutes to be IN OUR SEATS and we were sitting in a virtual parking lot outside the building, waiting to get to the parking garage. She got in the wrong lane because she was trying to find a shortcut into the parking lot. What she found was the lane leading us back onto the freeway.

Uh oh.

Now we have to appeal to the mercy of the other drivers to let us back in the lane we just left. We looked like some of THOSE people. You know? The ones who jump out of line only to drive up a bit and then cut back in? The ones people don't like and generally honk their horns at? That would be us.

[I'm going to have to rethink my opinion of THOSE people next time I see one. They might be stuck in a car with a friend who thinks she found a shortcut only to find out she really didn't. They might be very friendly and apologetic.]

So we finally get into the parking garage and she says to me, "You have the tickets, right?" She had given me something when we left her house so I pulled it out and there was only ONE ticket in the package.

Uh oh.

Now we have to find someone she knows and appeal to his mercy to get her in to see Desmond Tutu. We walk up to the front door and the gentlemen standing there is waiting for our tickets. PKB looks at him, starts to say something, and then closes her mouth. The man says, "Will call tickets?"

PKB looks him boldly in the eye, says, "Yeah, whatever," and marches us in the direction he's pointing. We don't have will call tickets. We don't have a ticket for her at all.

At that moment, she spies the man she's looking for and tells him our plight. He magically makes a balcony ticket appear and tells her to use it to get into the Hall and then she can sit with me.

Whew.Archbishop Tutu is the smaller man sitting in the center of the photo, dressed in black with no colored "sashes" around his neck.

He spoke about the HIV health crisis in South Africa, about poverty, about hunger, and about all the money that countries spend on weapons of death and destruction. He spoke of how a small fraction of that money could be used to feed, educate, and keep healthy all the children of the world.After he finished speaking, PKB and I had dinner at a Lebanese restaurant and spent an enjoyable hour chatting with each other. By the time we finished dinner, traffic had cleared out and we had a smooth ride home.